Genie reaches Summit

Virgin Radio 953 (CKZZ-FM) is a Canadian radio station with
studios located in Richmond, British Columbia. It has a 71.3kW
transmitter, which is situated on the forward slopes of Mount
Seymour
facing out over the Greater Vancouver region.

“Mount Seymour is very remote and there are no IP or ISDN links in
that part of the world,” said Cody MacKay, Director of Engineering
for Astral Radio in Vancouver since 2009. “I manage the engineering
requirements for 3 stations and like many other stations in the
region we use a point-to-point microwave link between our studios
in Richmond and the transmitter site on Mount Seymour to transmit
the signal for CKZZ.”

“Our ageing studio-to-transmitter codecs were becoming increasingly
unreliable and a few months ago I decided to replace them with new
generation IP codecs. I was impressed by the features offered by
the Genie STL IP codec, so I called Tyler Everitt at Pippin
Technical with the intention of putting the codecs to the
test.”

“Tyler was very helpful in arranging the demo and when they arrived
I connected them up to the internet to see how they performed over
an unmanaged public IP link. I was very impressed. They were very
easy to configure and were rock steady over the open internet over
an extended test period, so I figured they would be pretty solid
over a dedicated microwave link with loads of bandwidth.”

“We ordered a pair of the Genie STLs and installed one at the
studio and the other at the transmitter. They were simple to
install and are connected using AAC encoding at 192Kbps. The codecs
are perfect for our purpose and probably the thing I was most
impressed with is the multiple levels of redundancy offered by the
Genies.”

“Dual power, dual Ethernet and audio backup are standard and the
codecs also include STL-grade alarm options. The network failure
detection feature also lets you switch seamlessly to an alternative
ISP backup connection if your primary network connection is
temporarily lost. This is managed by Tieline’s SmartStream PLUS
software which can stream simultaneous
redundant packet streams from each Ethernet port.”

“The codecs have been installed and connected to our Dragonwave
AirPair wireless backhaul link and on air continuously for months
now and they haven’t missed a beat! They have performed flawlessly
and sound great. When our other mission critical links need to be
replaced I would have no hesitation in installing Genie STLs at
these other sites.”